Evolution of Type

Evolution of Type is an awesome project created by Andreas Scheiger a designer from Vienna, Austria. When his eyes crossed the excerpt of famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy´s “The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering” (see below) letters full of life showed in his mind´s eye, resulting in these amazing artworks… Letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy! He drafted this cognition in a chart for print and in order to prove his finding to the interested audience he took one step further. He surgically opened the letters, to discover muscles, veins, tendons and bone just like the ones shared by so many living creatures.

“Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things. indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention.(…) A letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it.”

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About the author

Houke de Kwant is a 28 year old communication & multimedia design graduate from the Netherlands and the creator of TheArtHunters (former Daily Inspiration, which was started as part of his study). He is currently working as a front-end developer at Ivaldi, an internet agency in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.